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I don't know what it is but I'm having a very hard time getting this Snowball mic to record consistently. Or maybe it's me. It just seems to have a different.. what's the word.. tone? Every time I use it. If I splice two recordings together there is a noticeable difference every time, despite my efforts to duplicate posture, location, etc. I need to correct a few areas early in the video when I didn't know about pop filters (I made my own out of a ring clamp and nylon). But to just get a few nasty pops out means having a roller coaster of pitch/amplitude changes. I'm beginning to wonder if my setup might be at fault - either the microphone having issues itself or the PC.. don't know. Literally have done everything the exact same as far as I can tell.

One other question.. I was looking at the Youtube post video settings yesterday when I posted those snippets, and I see they ask 'this this video for children'? Do they mean is the video explicitly made for kids, or just safe for them? It's not really clear if doing so segregates the video from adults if you say yes.

Your environment (room tone) might be the cause of your recordings not being consistent. Ventilation, background noise, etc. If you don't need to be on camera and can record away from your computer, try recording in a clothes closet (seriously, it dampens echo).

The text for "made for kids" is a COPPA regulatory requirement. The text is fairly specific; it asks if the video is targeted primarily to children. Since you're not making children's content, you should answer "no".

One other question.. I was looking at the Youtube post video settings yesterday when I posted those snippets, and I see they ask 'this this video for children'? Do they mean is the video explicitly made for kids, or just safe for them? It's not really clear if doing so segregates the video from adults if you say yes.

Make sure you go into your channel's advanced settings and choose the option indicating that your channel is NOT made for kids:

Otherwise, if YouTube thinks your channel is made for kids, either across the entire channel or on a per-video basis, your videos will end up with the comments disabled, likes/dislikes disabled, view counter hidden, and the ability to add your videos to a playlist (such as Watch Later or Favorites) disabled. I have noticed this happening on some of Ian Mavrick's videos ("RE1974" on YouTube -- the Australian TRS-80 guy).

Note that choosing the "not made for kids" option does NOT mean that children are not allowed to watch your videos -- it just means that they're not intended to be your channel's PRIMARY audience.

Okay, so here is the 'finished' product. It's unlisted for now while I mull it over some more, but feel free to check out and comment. I'm not afraid of correction or criticism.

I always found Youtube to be particularly useful as a collector - you get to see a machine actually operate, see what's normal/abnormal, and decide if it's something you really want. I'm not looking to make a career out of this as I already have one - just fill in the blanks, provide some (hopefully) useful information to both collectors and non-collectors alike (especially younger people who are totally unaware of this stuff) and show what it is and how it works.

This was supposed to be a 6 or 7 minute quick 'tour' video but morphed into something more as I learned more about video editing and animation. It became almost as much about the creation process as the actual subject matter. I very much welcome any corrections to the historical subject, OSI, as the information I researched (for weeks) was at times very confusing and even contradictory from source to source.

Because I am trying to keep it accessible to a wide audience, I don't get *too* technical. I'm not an electronics engineer; my own understandings of things are not always 100% so there may be some errors to correct.

That is one of the very best first efforts I've ever seen! Clear and informative with a light brush of humor. It looked like you used a camera with dual pixel autofocus, as your overhead shots have good focus when the subject depth changes. Audio quality was also very good during your narration.

If all of your videos are roughly this level of quality, presentation, and information, you'll definitely find a large audience (if that's what you're after). Great work!

Thanks muchly for that! It means a lot. I've always been a bit camera shy so sticking myself in there wasn't easy.

The camera for about 90% of the video was my Samsung Note 10+. The cam I used at the very beginning and in a few cuts was my Note 8, which had a smashed camera lens shield and had developed spots (which you can see if you look closely). I am amazed at the difference in quality between the two even though they have the same MP rating. With better lighting, I think the 10+ could do an even better job than it did.

I think really my main beef with this video is the audio. I started recording with my cam phone and then ponied up for a Blue Snowball, which I then rerecorded the narration with. It's pretty awesome, but getting consistent tone proved to be really difficult for some reason. I think a key mistake was not fully scripting it out and reading it all in one sitting. But I kept coming up with new things to add or fix, and that required cutting and pasting new audio in, and unfortunately despite my best efforts to replicate conditions, I couldn't get it 100% consistent. To make matters worse, I had not been schooled about pop filters and found some really nasty pops throughout. Which, having constructed a pop filter from a ring clamp and nylon hose, I went after the worst of.

It'll be interesting to see if I can apply what I've learned to the next project. I'm probably going to tackle my TVT project next, which is a bigger subject and will require a lot of narration and careful editing.

So last night when I went to bed the video seemed to have settled at 121 views after 3 days. Then early this am my phone started buzzing with youtube alerts, and the view count hit 433?!

Is that just the youtube algorithm doing its thing??

Probably. The platform is full of videos which get very few views, so it considers them to just be background noise, not worth promoting to anyone or even keeping an accurate view count on. But there's a threshold (it used to be 300 views, not sure what it is now) above which YouTube does consider your video to be a legitimate effort that is worth suggesting to viewers and keeping an accurate view count on it.

Just one slight suggestion from me: Make the background music quieter next time. I found it to be a bit distracting, but maybe I'm just unusually sensitive to it because I see a lot of highly popular videos with music that nearly drowns out the speaker's voice and no one seems to complain about it!

Probably. The platform is full of videos which get very few views, so it considers them to just be background noise, not worth promoting to anyone or even keeping an accurate view count on. But there's a threshold (it used to be 300 views, not sure what it is now) above which YouTube does consider your video to be a legitimate effort that is worth suggesting to viewers and keeping an accurate view count on it.

Just one slight suggestion from me: Make the background music quieter next time. I found it to be a bit distracting, but maybe I'm just unusually sensitive to it because I see a lot of highly popular videos with music that nearly drowns out the speaker's voice and no one seems to complain about it!

I agree. I had a hard time.with getting volume right. I'm very self conscious, so when I was recording and prepping the video, I kept the volume down to keep my wife and kids from hearing it and razzing me. But when I did the first play at normal volume it sounded too loud, so I dialed back. Then it was too quiet. I'm not really sure how you get the optimum given that everyone listens at different volumes. There must be a technique.